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Democrats Take Impeachment Probe Public as Trump Roars Defiant

Democrats Take Impeachment Probe Public as Trump Roars Defiant

(Bloomberg) -- House Democrats this week are taking their effort to impeach Donald Trump into a risky new phase of public hearings that the president is eager to turn into a made-for-TV personal battle, echoing his successful White House run in 2016.

The hearings on Wednesday and Friday feature three career diplomats who, in previous closed-door depositions, outlined attempts by Trump’s advisers to use the prospect of an Oval Office meeting and military aid to pressure Ukraine to publicly announce an investigation of Trump’s political rivals.

With these sessions, the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry moves into a much higher stakes phase for Trump and Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, both of whom will be struggling to direct the narrative of how the president’s first term ends.

Democrats Take Impeachment Probe Public as Trump Roars Defiant

Trump’s response has been defiance. He warned Republicans in a tweet Sunday that when discussing his July call with Ukraine’s president to not be “led into the fools trap of saying it was not perfect, but is not impeachable. No, it is much stronger than that. NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!”

He and his allies also are scripting in villains -- primarily Schiff and the whistle-blower whose complaint about the Ukraine call triggered the current impeachment inquiry.

“We’ve seen Adam Schiff and all of his lies,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Monday on Fox News. “We’ve seen they’re conveniently ignoring this whistle-blower.”

It’s a well-tested strategy that Trump has been adept at using to keep Republican voters in his corner and GOP members of Congress in line through multiple controversies since he began running for office.

Public Opinion

Support for impeachment has grown, but stabilized, as Trump fights congressional Democrats at each step of the investigation. Almost every poll taken since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry and the White House released a transcript of Trump’s call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy find a plurality or bare majority of Americans favor impeaching the president. For example, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found 49% favor Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, compared with 46% who don’t.

Other surveys with similar results show that support for impeachment is mostly driven by more than eight in 10 Democrats, along with a plurality of self-described independents. Republicans remain staunchly behind Trump.

Lawmakers from both parties will be watching to see if this week’s open hearings sway public opinion.

The witnesses who previously testified behind closed doors will lay out their recollections about the Trump administration delaying military aid to Ukraine in return for an investigation of the president’s potential 2020 challenger, Joe Biden, and an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election to benefit Democrats.

Democrats Take Impeachment Probe Public as Trump Roars Defiant

Top U.S. envoy to Ukraine William Taylor, who is set to appear Wednesday, said he grew increasingly concerned that Ukraine aid was being held hostage to White House demands for politically motivated investigations. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, who also is scheduled to testify that day, said he was told that Trump “wanted nothing less than President Zelenskiy to go to the microphone and say ‘investigations, Biden and Clinton.’”

On Friday, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch is expected to recount a pressure campaign led by Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, that led to her ouster.

Televised Appearances

Democrats are counting on these televised appearances bringing to life testimony that’s been given behind closed doors and detailed in more than 2000 pages of transcripts.

To counter that, Trump and his allies have been challenging the entire process, seeking to tarnish the credibility of witnesses and, in particular, focus on Schiff as the leader of an unfair partisan war against the president. Trump has tweeted or spoken regularly about the California Democrat, saying he wants to sue Schiff, that he should be investigated for treason and that he should resign.

Trump tweeted several times on Monday to claim without evidence that Schiff has been releasing “doctored” transcripts of witness depositions conducted by House investigators. Trump also called the inquiry a “totally one sided Witch Hunt.”

“It’s an old adage that If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table,” Representative Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said Monday. “They are pounding the table. And that means it’s a safe assumption that they will go after Adam.”

Schiff stumbled early in the inquiry during a public hearing in September, which opened him to attacks from Trump and his allies. He delivered an exaggerated parody of Trump’s July 25 conversation with Zelenskiy, saying Trump sounded like a Mafia boss running “a classic organized crime shakedown.” Trump accused Schiff of lying.

Hearing Rules

“There will be a lot of attention on Adam Schiff, the role of Adam Schiff himself as a back-witness, and how he is conducting the hearing,” said Samuel Everett Dewey, a former congressional counsel who led investigations in key committees in both the House and Senate.

Schiff, a former federal prosecutor, will have an important advantage over Trump’s Republican defenders on the committee because of rules that will give him or his legal staff the first 45 minutes of witness questioning, according to Kurt Bardella, a former spokesman and senior adviser for Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee from 2009 to 2013, who has since switched parties. Republicans will get the next 45 minutes.

“For better or worse, much like debates, these hearings are won or lost in the first hour, when they have the most eyeballs,” Bardella said.

The House hearings come 20 years after Republicans brought charges against Bill Clinton and more than 46 years after a special Senate committee held televised public hearings that helped lead to Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Public television broadcast all 250 hours worth of the Watergate hearings in 1973, producing such memorable moments as Senator Howard Baker asking, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” The folksy manner and demeanor of the chairman of that committee, Democrat Sam Ervin of North Carolina, led the 51 days of hearings from May until November 1973, which ultimately paved the way for Nixon’s downfall.

‘Tall Order’

But Washington politics and media coverage and is much different today -- and more polarized. TV and radio outlets that now more openly cater to the right or left will emphasize different spins. And real-time viewing will not be limited to television, with social media platforms ready to share every minute detail of the action.

The process that Schiff and Pelosi are pursuing also differs from those earlier impeachment hearings, said Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University.

The Watergate investigation unfolded over the course of a year in a Senate select committee, he said, and the Clinton impeachment occurred following a long special-counsel investigation.

“House Democrats and Chairman Adam Schiff are trying to do both between September 25 and Christmas,” Huder said. “It’s a tall order.”

This week will be the first test of how public, highly focused media coverage affects the president’s public support. Huder says he believes the House will impeach Trump, and the only question in both chambers will be whether there is any bipartisan backing for his impeachment and removal from office.

“While the president’s support on Capitol Hill is not very good, he continues to garner consistent support from roughly 41% of the public,” Huder said. “It’s unclear Schiff can move the needle given strong partisan dynamics bolstering Trump’s support and the short time frame he has to accomplish it.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Anna Edgerton

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